Gay theatre has many valuable stories to share with the world: stories about self-discovery, about being fundamentally different from what those around one appear to be, about growing up to be radically at odds with one’s parents, about forming relationships in which the rules have to be made up as one goes along.
Like any minority-rooted theatre with a political subtext, gay plays that pursue these themes constantly risk lapsing into limiting (if potentially liberating) ghetto talk, dimensionless propaganda or sudsy melodrama. The best gay plays transcend these elements, as does all art that transforms the particular into the universal; but even those that don’t still have an important social value that must not be underestimated.
Throughout history, theatre has provided an opportunity for a community to get together and talk about itself. And like all “ghetto theatre,” even the most simplistic gay plays serve the primitive function of affirming the existence of a mistreated minority, confirming its convictions, and acting as a corrective to neglect or abuse by the culture-at-large.
The image of gay life traditionally presented onstage—when it was there at all—was a distorted one: We had the choice of being frivolous fairies, psychotic bull-dykes or suicidal queens. With the advent of the gay movement (which more or less coincided with the success of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band), gay people began demanding honest portrayals of ourselves onstage; we wanted positive images, role models, alternatives to stereotypes. The result has been varied: gay theatre by gay men and women, gay theatre written and produced by heterosexuals, serious and sensationalistic, occasionally on Broadway, but much more often Off.
Some of the most acclaimed gay plays have, in fact, been performed only rarely or in the briefest of runs. For some, scripts don’t even exist. Journalist Terry Helbing catalogued more than 400 gay works, published and unpublished, in The Gay Theatre Alliance Directory of Gay Plays (J H Press, 1980), and editor William Hoffman took the first step toward establishing a standard repertoire with Gay Plays: The First Collection (Avon, 1979). A collection ideologically confined to presenting “positive images” would have censored not only the somewhat dated anguish of Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George and Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright, but also the biting critique of the gay world found in Robert Patrick’s T-Shirts— and in doing so would have excluded a portion of our world that does exist. Hoffman’s anthology reminds us that some of us are frivolous fairies, psychotic bull-dykes and suicidal queens.
Before The Boys in the Band, the existence of gay characters was so rare that instances could be tallied in a matter of seconds. Since Boys, the self-identified gay theatre has grown in strength and influenced the mainstream to the point where it is no longer remarkable for conventional plays to feature gay characters. For all intents and purposes, gay theatre began as a result of Crowley’s hit play, much the same way the gay liberation movement began with the Stonewall rebellion in 1969, when a routine police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar incited the patrons, led by drag queens, to fight back for the first time in history. In both cases, gays were a visible presence beforehand, but the event was the catalyst for a sudden eruption of activity. Yet while The Boys in the Band was undeniably a turning point, its influence must be documented through at least two entirely different histories: the history of the mass-media image of gays, and the history of contemporary theatre made by gays themselves.
The differences between mass images of gay men and lesbians (created for the most part by heterosexuals) and efforts created by gays on the journey to self-definition are remarkable. As most psychiatric research into homosexuality starts with a basically negative, or at least neutral and scholarly, attitude—“very much the way a scientist might look at bugs or monkeys as something that might perhaps have something to offer the higher form of species,” to quote essayist Allen Young—this is not surprising. “In the post-Stonewall gay-liberation literature,” Young goes on to say, “the writings of gay people [are concerned with] trying to communicate with each other and to reveal the reality of the gay experience to straight society”—not to mention discovering that reality and setting it down for ourselves. And the job is a big one.
The history that leads up to The Boys in the Band and paves the way for La Cage aux Folles begins in the days when homosexuality was not allowed on the stage under any circumstances. Sappho, a play by Alphonse Daudet and Adolph Belot about the lesbian poet, was first performed in the U.S. in 1895, but when revived in 1900 it caused a great scandal and ultimately the play was banned. In 1926, The Captive by Edouard Bourdet, described by Brooks Atkinson as “the tragedy of a young woman who falls into a twisted relationship with another woman,” and Sex by Jane Mast (better known as Mae West), which has a subplot concerning a male hustler, met similar fates; so did West’s 1927 The Drag, whose main character was a man in conflict over his homosexuality, and her 1928 Pleasure Man, a backstage comedy featuring campy gay men as secondary characters. As late as 1944, theatres in New York refused to rent to the producers of Dorothy and Howard Baker’s Trio because the play dealt with an older woman’s “unnatural” feelings for a girl. On the other hand, Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree (1932), which portrayed a wealthy bachelor’s protective relationship with a working-class boy, was produced in London and New York without condemnation, presumably because the love between the two men never quite went so far as to speak its name.
When homosexuality did begin to whisper its name onstage, it was usually in melodramatic treatments of false accusation (Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent); vice (William Inge’s The Boy in the Basement); or violence (Inge’s Natural Affection and The Cell, Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George, LeRoi Jones’s The Toilet). By the 1950s and ’60s, somewhat more sympathetic portrayals of homosexuals had begun to filter into popular theatre, although the gay content was still largely between the lines, and often as not gays were still ultimately seen as unhappy and pathetic—not surprising, considering society’s attitude toward homosexuals. New York state law officially prohibited the presentation of homosexuality onstage until 1967.
In the mass-audience, commercial theatre —the straight theatre, if you will—the appearance of The Boys in the Band signaled another step in the increasing boldness (or tastelessness, as some would have considered it) of stage productions. Its four-letter words made it racy, and its homosexual milieu gave it an exotic attraction akin to that of a circus freak-show. The play’s roaring success seemed to indicate that homosexuality was no longer a taboo subject—in fact, that it was commercially viable.
This realization enabled other writers to deal with homosexuality on a more honest, open level without meeting immediate commercial disaster. Simon Gray’s Butley, Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box, John Hopkins’s Find Your Way Home, Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes, James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante’s A Chorus Line, and David Rabe’s Streamers were among the first plays that presented openly gay characters in mainstream dramas. On the other hand, this new freedom opened the doors to a flood of sensationalized plays exploiting the topic of homosexuality for its novelty or shock value-as in the “kinky” use of gay characters to spice up a tepid farce about marital infidelity in Norman, Is That You?
While theatre was moving ahead by tiny steps in its treatment of homosexuality, the subject was approached explicitly and with far greater sophistication in literature. Novels about gay life-such as John Rechy’s City of Night, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers were widely read and commercially successful decades before homosexuality was accepted onstage. By comparison, film and television—more mass media than theatre—were even slower about presenting honest portrayals of gay life. Part of the reason for this is understandable; books are written and read in private and thus are far safer than other forms of artistic expression. A book does not judge, as parents, teachers or friends may, or tell one’s secret before one is prepared to face it or share it with others.
Theatre, on the other hand, is public. To present homosexuality in the theatre, someone (an author, speaking though an actor) has to stand up and say, “This is me. I am gay.” Playwrights and performers tended to view homosexuals as an “other,” “them”—which may explain the strange, strained nature of most gay characters before 1968. Characters who would have gone unnoticed had they appeared in a novel suddenly had stunning impact when seen live. The Boys in the Band represented another first: “the crossroads at which the homosexual American novel and the theatre met,” as French critic Georges-Michel Sarotte pointed out. “The sight of men congregating, loving, laughing, crying like everyone else—whereas before they had existed only in novels or as members of a secret, infamous society—suddenly forced the audience to recognize that they were human beings like everyone else.”
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The history of what could more accurately be called gay theatre, separate from the appearance of gay characters in mainstream plays, is bound up in the burgeoning of Off-Off Broadway theatre in New York and the politics of the gay movement. The accidental birth of Off-Off Broadway is generally attributed to Joe Cino, whose Caffe Cino started out in 1958 as a bohemian hangout. In the beginning, the café’s regular crowd of writers, painters and artistically minded refugees from small-town America began to perform poetry readings and scenes from plays as an occasional entertainment. But before long the Cino had become a real theatre, an anarchic, unpretentious, amazingly prolific collective of actors and writers. From the very beginning most—if not all—of the Cino core were gay.
Minor plays by established gay writers were a frequent feature of the Cino’s programming: Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Happy Prince, William Inge’s The Tiny Closet, Noël Coward’s Fumed Oak and Still Life, Jean Genet’s Deathwatch, Andre Gide’s Philoctetes, lots of Tennessee Williams one-acts, and so on. But more important, the Cino attracted, inspired and nurtured a number of young, untried playwrights—including Doric Wilson, H.M. Koutoukas, Lanford Wilson and Robert Patrick—for whom gayness was an essential part of a new, freewheeling, sometimes whimsical, often campy theatre. Among the significant gay plays that came out of the Cino are Patrick’s The Haunted Host, in which an eccentric writer exorcises the ghost of an unhappy love affair, and Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright, in which a lonely drag queen goes to pieces and slowly puts himself back together.
After the Caffe Cino, other Off-Off Broadway theatres sprang up. Among the first was the Judson Poets Theater, run by Al Carmines. The Judson attracted the vanguard of new playwrights, many of them gay. Among its most noted productions were Carmines’ adaptations of the plays of Gertrude Stein and his musical The Faggot. With the founding of Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, the Off-Off Broadway movement went into full swing, and the percentage of gay input was high.
In 1966, a group of flamboyant gay actors and writers put together a theatre devoted to total outrageousness called the Playhouse of the Ridiculous under the direction of Ronald Tavel and John Vaccaro. Gay camp and monstrous excesses were the specialties of productions such as Screen Test, in which a cruel director tortured a would-be star; and Shower, which Stefan Brecht, detecting his father’s far-reaching influence, called “a spoof on James Bond movies with Brechtian interludes.” A spinoff of the original group, led by writer-actor-director Charles Ludlam, became the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which has flourished for 20 years as a classical comic theatre in New York. The Ridiculous as a genre was part product and part progenitor of a new tradition of gay camp/drag theatre, whose participants range from groups like the Ballet Trockadero, the Cockettes, Hot Peaches and Bloolips, to performance artists such as Ethyl Eichelberger (best-known for his vaudevillean portraits of legendary female characters such as Phaedre, Medea and Nefertiti); San Francisco-based puppeteer Winston Tong; John Kelly (who started out creating tiny German Expressionist operas in East Village punk clubs); British drag performer and political activist Neil Bartlett; and Split Britches, a New York lesbian troupe formed by Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw and Deborah Margolin.
The early Off-Off Broadway movement, by rejecting the rules of traditional commercial theatre both in style and in substance, instigated a renaissance in new American playwriting. Just as Off-Off Broadway incorporated the voice of the emerging black theatre, it also gave gay artists a forum for the unselfconscious exploration of their own lifestyles.
And for gay audiences and gay theatre people who found The Boys in the Band an accurate representation of only part of the gay world—who objected to its perpetuation of old stereotypes about gays being pathetic, neurotic, effeminate, incomplete people—Off-Off Broadway provided a vital outlet. With the force of the burgeoning post-Stonewall gay liberation movement behind it, the backlash against such limited portrayals of gays as Crowley’s fueled a theatrical explosion.
One person who made the connection between the Off-Off Broadway movement and gay politics was playwright-director Doric Wilson. Wilson, who was taking part in the founding of Circle Repertory Theatre at the time of the Stonewall uprising, pondered the dilemma Boys in the Band raised and set out to create a forum in which more diverse creative gay voices could make themselves heard. Adamant that “there should be a place where authors and artists who want to deal with their gayness can have their work done, and done well, and done away from the marketplace where sensationalism is the rule of the day,” Wilson established The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS) in February 1974. Though it operated steadily for little more than three years, TOSOS broke ground for an ongoing theatre run by and for gays. Its productions ranged from Lovers, an original musical by Peter del Valle and Steve Sterner, to classic plays by Noël Coward and Joe Orton, to Wilson’s own Oscar Wilde fantasia Now She Dances! and The West Street Gang, a docudrama about antigay violence. Producer John Glines was associated with TOSOS for a short time before he left in 1976 to form his own theatre, the Glines, which remained active for six years, producing mostly new scripts by writers such as George Whitmore (The Rights) and Jane Chambers (Last Summer at Bluefish Cove).
Outside of New York, gay theatres were forming in Minneapolis (the Out and About Theater), San Francisco (Theatre Rhinoceros), London (Gay Sweatshop) and Los Angeles (Celebration Theatre). By 1983, the newly formed Gay Theatre Alliance counted 40 theatres among its membership, including theatres in Amsterdam, Toronto and Sydney. Today gay theatres from Atlanta to Anchorage form a network that has nurtured such playwrights as Robert Patrick, Victor Bumbalo, Robert Chesley and Doug Holsclaw.
With the high quotient of gay talents working in every aspect of the business, it was inevitable that professional theatre would eventually intersect with the self-defined, non-commercial-oriented gay theatre. No one could have predicted, however, that the catalyst would be a four-and-a-half-hour trilogy about a drag queen that contains explicit references to anal sex and a rousing conclusion in which a nice Jewish mother is told she can pack up her bunny slippers and go back to Miami if she can’t accept her son’s gay lifestyle. Even those who saw Harvey Fierstein’s plays at La Mama when they premiered individually were not prepared for the cumulative effect of The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery and Widows and Children First, performed together as Torch Song Trilogy. Seen all at once on Broadway, in a production mounted by the Glines and starring the author himself, the trilogy proved to be a powerful, profoundly moving statement and went on to capture several Tony awards.
Beyond the trilogy’s structural ingenuity, explosive rhetoric and disarming wit, Fierstein’s triumph was in taking his audience deep into an “exotic” emotional situation (a bisexual triangle, a gay “family”) and confronting the basic, even conventional dilemmas of modern life. The sexual revolution that permitted instant gratification didn’t guarantee satisfaction, the trilogy shows. Liberation from the nuclear family, Fierstein suggests, brought its own problems: what to do with our longing for community, how to obliterate the pain of losing your lover to someone else, to cancer, to thugs on the street. Torch Song Trilogy doesn’t provide answers to all the questions it raises, but it does give a model of how to come to terms with our common struggle for self-acceptance and love.
What’s finally most remarkable about Torch Song Trilogy is that it portrays gay life not as an isolated phenomenon but in constant relation to the society at large. And the society it exposes is one whose sexual values have undergone an enormous upheaval, a contemporary revolution that has left gays and straights alike struggling to learn the new rules.
In the modern world, radical impulses are absorbed and defanged with sometimes frightening speed. The same year that the producer of Torch Song Trilogy aroused controversy by thanking his male lover on the television broadcast of the Tony awards, producer Allen Carr commissioned Harvey Fierstein to write the book for a Broadway musical based on the hit French play and movie La Cage aux Folles. If the success of Torch Song Trilogy signaled a merging of visionary gay theatre with mainstream culture, La Cage aux Folles seemed like a co-opting of gay tradition to revitalize the wheezing corpse of the Broadway musical. Still, within the artistically stultified and socially conservative form of the genre, a long-running musical that celebrates the union of lovers who are neither young and beautiful nor heterosexual is in its own way unprecedented. A far cry from the self-hatred of The Boys in the Band, La Cage aux Folles’s anthem of pride in the name of love, Jerry Herman’s “I Am What I Am,” sounds a message of gay self-affirmation as passionate as that of Fierstein’s:
ZAZA: I am what I am
And what I am
Needs no excuses
I deal my own deck
Sometimes the ace
Sometimes the deuces
There’s one life
And there’s no return and no deposit
One life
So it’s time to open up your closet
Life’s not worth a damn
Till you can say—“Hey, world, I am what I am!”
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Before World War II, America cherished its image as a melting pot that dissolved all ethnic distinctions, assimilating immigrant experiences and minority characteristics in order to produce homogeneous middle-class citizens. The events of World War II, however, made it necessary for individuals with ethnic histories that differed from the white Anglo-Saxon norm to assert their differences from the American dream. The spectre of Hitler’s death camps mandated the elevation of Jewish consciousness for protection, even survival. Blacks and women who made vital contributions to American society during the war also found their identities suddenly thrown into question; the autonomy they had experienced made them unable and unwilling to recede to second-class status after the war was over. Along with the movements for basic rights of these groups came the Kinsey report in 1948, with its astonishing documentation that “only 50 per cent of the population is exclusively heterosexual throughout its adult life.” A new group of human beings—not a freakish mutation or easily dismissed minority—entered American consciousness.
Then in the 1950s, American society was threatened with enforced conformity, personified by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in his campaign against communism, homosexuality and other “un-American activities.” The ultimate rejection of McCarthyism was an expression of the real American impulse toward individual freedom. No longer could history be portrayed as the history of rich straight white men. The triumph over McCarthyism was the celebration of human diversity.
At the same time, however, no rich straight white man can be depended upon to rewrite history to include others who are not like him—and so minority theatre, like other forms of minority expression, comes to serve a crucial function. Jews, blacks, women and gays can reclaim their own place in the continuity of history by making their voices heard.
That impulse is exemplified in a great range of writing by and about gay people. Street Theater, Doric Wilson’s comic dramatization of events on Christopher Street the night of the Stonewall riots, June 27, 1969, is in the tradition of some of the earliest outfront gay theatre: part social history, part documentary. Using a stylized, cartoonish parade of what The Village Voice called “a collection of 16 gay culture icons”—a leatherman bartender, two fork-tongued drag queens who mourn the death of Judy Garland, a lesbian mechanic, a professorial closet queen, even the upscale couple Michael and Donald, straight out of The Boys in the Band, with their sweaters tied around their necks—Wilson lifts the familiar gay masks to show the human faces underneath. At the same time he skillfully traces the political alliances that led a motley group of disenfranchised women and men to decide they had nothing to lose by fighting back against the abuse of society and the law.
Street Theater was first performed in 1982 by Theatre Rhinoceros, San Francisco’s leading gay theatre. The same year a production opened in New York at a tiny theatre in Tribeca and then moved to the Mineshaft, the notorious/legendary leather-bar and sex club. Crudely staged, with actors occupying a narrow walkway between two groups of spectators on benches and folding chairs, this gay history performed in a gay space was nonetheless electrifying. Its performance conjured memories of the Federal Theater’s original New York production of Marc Blitzstein’s radical 1937 opera The Cradle Will Rock, which defied the government’s attempt to suppress its subversive anti-capitalist message by going on in a disused theatre without sets, lights, electricity or any power but the bond between the show and its audience.
Other plays emphasized the documentary aspect more strongly. Jonathan Katz’s Coming Out, for example, first produced in 1972 as a commemoration of Stonewall and later revived for a tour of New England, offered literary portraits of little-known figures from gay American history. Similarly, Crimes Against Nature, created by the Gay Men’s Theatre Collective from San Francisco, consisted of nine personal accounts by individuals in the process of overcoming obstacles on the path to establishing a gay identity. Unafraid of being seen as propagandistic, unconcerned with being accused of preaching to the already converted, these plays spoke directly to the social needs of their audiences, giving them a power that theatre regularly seeks but rarely finds.
And their influence was being felt in the mainstream, where gay characters gained increasingly sympathetic treatment. Martin Sherman’s Bent, produced on Broadway in 1979 with Richard Gere and David Dukes in the leading roles, begins on another famous night in gay history: Berlin, June 28, 1934, also known as “The Night of the Long Knives.” Aided by Richard Plant’s groundbreaking research on the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, Sherman’s play focuses on a pair of lovers captured by storm troopers as they attempt to flee Germany after Hitler’s purge (read: execution) of homosexuals in government. Rudy, the weaker, dies on a boxcar to Dachau. Having heard that prisoners wearing the pink triangle get the worst treatment, his lover Max bargains with train guards for the yellow star of a Jew. He earns it by committing a grotesque act: to convince the guards he isn’t “bent,” he rapes the corpse of a 13-year-old girl. As both a graphic portrayal of gay oppression in a historical context and a tribute to the power of love, Bent is an emotional tour de force and a major contribution to the body of Holocaust literature.
Largely through the influence of this play, the pink triangle was adopted as a symbol of contemporary gay pride. Yet in its conclusion—a donning of the pink triangle and then a suicide, as if in confirmation that it’s better to die as the person you are than to live as someone you’re not—Sherman brings up a troubling implication: that the only option for an open homosexual is suicide.
Based on the 1979 trial of Dan White for murdering San Francisco mayor George Moscone and openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk, Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (commissioned by San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre and first performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville) poses provocative-and unanswered—questions about antihomosexual prejudice and social justice in America. The contrast between the weak prosecution of Dan White and the emotional defense exemplifies the co-opting of “morality” by right-wing forces in America, who have tried to confuse the public (or perhaps merely the media) into believing that “moral values” and “liberal values” are mutually exclusive—conveniently overlooking concern for the rights of the underprivileged and the jarring incongruity of bigotry with the tenets of Christian morality. Execution of Justice lasted only a few days on Broadway in 1986, but it has had a long life outside of New York, where its message continues to bear insight. The play has been embraced by audiences in Baltimore, Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, Minneapolis and Washington.
While Execution of Justice may seem to belong to the same genre of courtroom dramas as Inherit the Wind, in fact Mann invented a different form to tell this particular story, a collage structure relying on first-hand interviews, mixed-media imagery including crucial excerpts from Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen’s Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk and even sound cues such as the haunting echo of Mary Ann White’s high heels on the marble floor of a deserted church.
Like Mann and other contemporary feminist writers such as Caryl Churchill and Ntozake Shange—all of whom have created bodies of work unconventional in their form as well as their content—lesbian playwrights have gained much from experimentation with dramatic structure and heightened language. Although the best-known lesbian playwright of recent years was the late Jane Chambers, who wrote in a naturalistic vein, younger writers have been more adventurous. Alexis De Veaux’s No, a cycle of poems, stories and scenes adapted for the stage by Glenda Dickerson at the New Federal Theater in 1981, fractures the political, social, sexual and emotional experiences of young black gay women into vivid fragments. If the structure of the play owes something to Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the brassy directness of De Veaux’s political invective and the lush sensuality of her language are all her own.
Holly Hughes emerged from New York’s East Village club scene, which has nurtured art stars such as Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, actress-comedienne Ann Magnuson and writer-director John Jesurun, as well as any number of young performance artists who mix dance, theatre, music and video with outspoken gay content. Hughes shares the TV-bred instinct for savage parody and aggressive infantilism that characterizes many East Village performers, but unlike most of them she is primarily a writer who blends junk-culture with poetry to make theatre that has been labeled “dyke noir” by critic C. Carr. In her plays The Well of Horniness, The Lady Dick and Dress Suits to Hire, produced at the woman-run WOW Cafe theatre, “Hughes has gleefully invented herself a genre with little precedent,” writes Carr. “From the hard-boiled fiction she loves, she’s appropriated the tough-guy talk, the lowlife mood, the shady shifty operators.” As for the crime, “the characters are the crime—women who drive each other to emotional extremes, who put their sexuality upfront where everyone has to acknowledge it.”
Among the crop of mainstream gay plays that have emerged in the 1980s, it’s interesting to note that many observe gay people finding new relationships with their families. Such works as Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July, William Finn’s March of the Falsettos, Victor Bumbalo’s Niagara Falls and Timothy Mason’s Levitation acknowledge that outside of New York and San Francisco there is no such thing as an exclusively gay lifestyle: you have to deal with the family. The lesbian mother in Caryl Churchill’s widely produced Cloud Nine and the gay father in March of the Falsettos are particularly intriguing characters as they reflect a complicated struggle: how to adjust to the transition from a socially condoned relationship to one for which there is no accepted or acceptable model. Lin in Cloud Nine finds flexibility rewarding and ends up sharing her house with her five-year-old daughter, her married lover Vicky, and Vicky’s gay (“I think I’m a lesbian”) brother Edward. In William Finn’s musical, on the other hand, for two men accustomed to independence, negotiating a working relationship proves bewilderingly difficult. “Life’s a sham, and every move is wrong,” cry the exhausted lovers. “We’ve examined every move as we move along.”
What’s refreshing about these plays is that they explore the content of gay lives rather than parading propaganda (see how happy we are) or melodrama (die, doomed queen). In Kathleen Tolan’s A Weekend Near Madison, which debuted at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1982, Nessa, a famous feminist folksinger, and her young female lover Sam have decided that they’d like to have a baby. To accomplish this goal, Nessa organizes a reunion of her college chums to select which of her male friends she would like to be the father of her child: her former boyfriend Jim, or his macho-pig brother Dave (whose wife Doe is barren from complications after an abortion). The form of the play may sound overly familiar—both the domestic drama aspect and the college-chums reunion genre were practically patented by Michael Weller in Moonchildren and Loose Ends—but here the content is revolutionary in its subtle overhaul of established notions about gender.
Just as structural innovation distinguishes contemporary lesbian and feminist writing, fantasy and theatricality are hallmarks of gay male sensibility, and for much the same reason: to rescue imaginative space from a society dominated by male heterosexuals. “Fantasy and ornament are the most genuinely subversive aspects of gay writing,” author Edmund White once remarked in a roundtable discussion on gay sensibilities. “Realism written with understatement and control subscribes to a conventional manner of seeing the world, of tracing causality, of defining character, of establishing hierarchies of importance. Realism is a legacy of fantasy, the imitation of the fantasies of the past; and for that reason realism is almost always conservative. A fantasist, by contrast, sets herself or himself up as someone capable of reimagining the world—and this challenge to order is perceived by cultural conservatives as ‘wrong,’ dangerous, anomalous, decadent. The anomaly is that an individual is exercising the right to play in a state of complete freedom, and this exercise becomes an invitation to readers to live lives of freedom.”
This freedom, White noted, is shared by others left out of the consensus culture as gays are—minority writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Ishmael Reed. Fantasy figures heavily in Evan Smith’s Remedial English, first produced as part of the Dramatists Guild’s Young Playwrights Festival at Playwrights Horizons in 1986. The play features as its hero a character familiar from lite but new to the theatre: a lovestruck gay schoolboy obsessed with a classmate. The fantasies at work in Terrence McNally’s The Lisbon Traviata are steamier—marinated in centuries of Italian music—as well as more lethal. The first act is the ultimate bitchy opera-queen conversation, the second a sordid lovers’ quarrel. The play, first staged at Manhattan’s Theatre Off Park, is a portrait of a love so strong, so operatically intense, that it finally destroys.
In Harry Kondoleon’s The Fairy Garden, which was first produced at the Double Image Theatre in New York and received a stellar revival at Second Stage in 1984, chic Dagny consults with two male friends, Roman and Mimi, who are lovers, about whether to stay with her rich but despicable husband or run off with her sexy mechanic boyfriend. But in nine short scenes, everything rapidly shifts. The lovers break up, Dagny cuts off her husband’s head and tosses it in the ice bucket, a real fairy appears (a real fairy?) to grant them one wish, and they decide to put the husband’s head back on. Mimi falls in love with Dagny, and the hated husband announces he’s fallen in love with the fairy, who is now disguised as a real woman (a real woman?). Finally, Roman and the fairy have a confrontation and—in a dreamlike coup de théâtre—disappear in a vapor of memory and obliterated identity. Underneath the fabulistic designer facade of The Fairy Garden is a modern romantic tragedy. The strength from which all else flows is the passion for love, the unquenchable lust, the yearning for connection with the Other that defines the language and the form and the almost tropical feverishness of Kondoleon’s writing.
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Compared to television’s live coverage every night of the latest election campaign or hostage crisis, theatre may seem like a cumbersome form of communication, lagging years behind in dealing with the urgent issues of the day. Yet theatre can also lead, asserting its ancient function as a public forum in which a community gathers to talk about itself. The best contemporary example is the theatre’s response to the AIDS crisis. William Hotfman’s As Is and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart took the lead in promoting education about AIDS and concern for the afflicted, a social obligation that the press, the government, even made-for-TV movies were slow to pick up on. The audiences for these and other plays about AIDS—Robert Chesley’s Jerker, for instance, or Doug Holsclaw’s The Life of the Party (a spin-off of The AIDS Show, a revue first performed at Theatre Rhinoceros in 1984)—experienced something extraordinary. The line between what was happening onstage and what was happening in the lives of the audience was so fine that the scripts for these works seemed a mere pretext for the gathering of individuals collectively seeking information about this mysterious disease, as well as an outlet for anger, anxiety and grief. These plays had a powerful impact on an audience that needed to bolster a still shaky sense of gay self-acceptance in order to face the onslaught of medical horrors and political backlash sure to come.
While AIDS has gone on to become a global concern, it struck first and deepest in the heart of the gay communities in New York and San Francisco, with their high populations of artists. Undoubtedly, it was this personal contact with AIDS that triggered such an immediate response. The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s report from the front lines about the formation in 1981 of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (the primarily volunteer organization, cofounded by Kramer, that has become the model for AIDS service agencies around the world), is part autobiography and part jeremiad, a gripping and caustically comic portrait of personalities and politics inside New York’s gay male community.
A polemicist at heart, Kramer frames all the play’s issues in black-and-white: You’re either helping the cause (by following his own outspoken example) or you’re responsible for murdering fellow gays. For sex, gay men have only two choices: orgiastic promiscuity or celibacy. This message unpleasantly echoes some of the “conventional wisdom” of the psychiatric community and has made Kramer’s work more appealing to straight audiences than gays. Still, infuriating and abrasive as it is, Kramer’s play is an impassioned call to political action. It became the New York Shakespeare Festival’s longest-running play ever, has been produced around the world and is scheduled to be made into a film by Twentieth Century Fox.
In rich contrast to Kramer’s revocation of sexual joy is Robert Chesley’s Jerker, or The Helping Hand, “A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Telephone Calls, Many of Them Dirty.” The subtitle Chesley has supplied makes his play sound raunchier than it really is. While the dialogue between two strangers who conduct their entire relationship on the telephone is racy enough to have launched FCC sanctions against a California radio station for broadcasting part of it on the air, Chesley is less concerned that the audience share his characters’ specific sexual fantasies than that they cherish the vitality of the sexual imagination in the face of death. As Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times, Jerker points out “more bluntly than any other play dealing with AIDS how the epidemic has threatened one of the fundamental reasons for an entire community’s very existence —its freedom of erotic expression—and challenged its hard-won self-esteem.”
Where The Normal Heart focuses on political aspects of the AlDS crisis and Jerker concerns itself with sexuality, William Hoffman’s As Is, premiered and since revived by Circle Repertory Company, looks at AIDS from a personal and social point of view. The drama concerns two men who are former lovers and how they cope with the situation when one of them is diagnosed with AIDS. Unlike Kramer’s unremitting despondence in The Normal Heart, Hoffman manages—without denying the toll that AIDS has taken or being Pollyanna-ish about the prospects of facing a life-threatening disease for which there is no known cure—to insist that where there is lite, there is hope. Popular with audiences on and Off Broadway, and on cable television around the country and around the world, As Is is the best play anyone has written yet about AIDS.
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There will always be skeptics who question the validity, even the existence, of such a thing as “gay culture” or “gay sensibility,” choosing to overlook or ignore the effects of a culture that raises us to be—does its best to make us be—heterosexual. But in the last decade, between the height of the disco era and the abyss of the AIDS crisis, gay culture has begun to infiltrate and to influence mainstream culture to the benefit of both, thanks to openly gay artists in every field of endeavor: visual art, pop music, the dance, the novel, film, journalism, performance art and theatre.
Contemporary gay plays present a wide range of vastly divergent characters, dramatic forms, ethnic experience, sexual experience, political viewpoints and visions of homosexuality. They don’t adhere to any party line. To some degree they represent the pluralistic reality of the gay and lesbian population of America, which in turn represents the democratic ideal of Western civilization. It would be naive, however, not to acknowledge that there is ongoing debate over which more accurately represents “the people’s voice” in a democratic society: the will of the individual, or the majority rule. The tension is one that underlies all minority culture in America. The despairing view is that making one attribute the basis for our identity, whether sexual preference, race or religion, gives others permission to persecute us on the same basis.
The hopeful view is that we will come to see the richness in our differences and to cherish our differences as essential to humanity.
This article is adapted from Don Shewey’s introduction to Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, a collection to be published in June by Grove Press.
